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I N H IS LI K EN E S S
hen Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra died in Madrid
at the age of sixty-eight on the evening of April 22,
1616, and his remains were buried in an unmarked
grave at the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians
(Trinitarias Descalzas), few—not even Cervantes himself, in
spite of his reputation as the “Prince of Wits”—predicted that
his work would have a secure place on the bookshelf of classics.
It is true that the First Part of his magnum opus, El ingenioso
hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha—in English The Ingenious
Hidalgo Don Quixote of la Mancha—had achieved a succès d’estime
that reached far and wide. But in early-seventeenth-century
Spain, the novel wasn’t considered as prestigious as other literary genres, such as the comedia, a favorite of theater-goers, or
the sonnet, a poetic form that elicited obsessive devotion among
lovers of prosody.
This novel in particular was a spoof; that is, it was not con-
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sidered a serious work of artistic expression. Plus, Cervantes
was known as a playwright of modest talent, not as celebrated
as Félix Arturo Lope de Vega y Carpio, who was known as the
“Phoenix of Wits” and author of nearly eighteen hundred comedias and three thousand sonnets, few of which survive today.
Nor did Cervantes’s sonnets or other poetic exercises, also seen
as tame in comparison to those by such figures as Francisco
de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora, grant him a secure place
among his literary peers. Though today the Spanish government offers the annual Premio Cervantes to honor the lifetime
achievement of an outstanding writer in the Spanish language,
an award that frequently goes to figures whose work coheres
with the intellectual status quo, it is unlikely that Cervantes
himself would have been the recipient of such an award. It
was Lope de Vega, in fact, who, commenting on the writers on
whose oeuvre readers needed to keep an eye on the upcoming
year (1604, though the date is debatable), mercilessly stated,
“None is as bad as Cervantes.”
The overall plot of El Quijote is rather easy to summarize,
although any summary of it inevitably feels reductive, even
stilted. A fiftyish hidalgo by the name of Alonso Quijano (also
known as Quijana, Quijada, and Quesada), living in a hacienda
in an unknown place in the region of La Mancha in central
Spain, has been spending his days reading novels of chivalry,
marvel-filled cycles of narratives, extremely popular among
aristocratic readers, written in prose or verse and based on fantastic legends that featured a masculine hero, a knight-errant
who embarks on a quest while usually declaring Platonic love
for his dame. The word hidalgo comes from fidalgo. According to
lore, it means hijo de algo, child of someone. In truth, it refers to
a member of the lower nobility. It might also refer to someone
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whose ancestry was defined by purity of blood, that is, one who
came from a family of old Christians.
In Spain at the time, there were different kinds of hidalgos,
as listed in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE),
including the hidalgo de ejecutoria, someone whose blood lineage
makes him such, and the hidalgo de privilegio, a person whose
position is acquired through money or privilege. The novel’s
narrator doesn’t offer any further detail. The reader is simply
told that the protagonist is a hidalgo who lives with his niece,
who is under twenty; a female housekeeper, who is past forty;
and a lad who does the field work. That this hidalgo is on good
terms with the town’s priest and barber. And that he doesn’t
attend to the affairs of his hacienda because he spends all his
time reading. Indeed, such is his habit that, in John Ormsby’s
English translation (hereafter used, unless stated otherwise),
published in London in 1885, we are told:
He became so absorbed in his books that he spent his
nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn
to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and
much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.
Having “lost his wits,” Alonso Quijano suddenly convinces himself he is a knight-errant like Palmerin of England and Amadis
of Gaul. Persuading himself that his mission in life is to correct all of the world’s ills, he comes up with the heroic name
of Don Quixote of La Mancha, turns the beautiful village girl
Aldonza Lorenzo into his lady Dulcinea del Toboso, and identifies a commoner known as Sancho Panza as his squire and loyal
companion.
All these events are conveyed in just a few early pages. The
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rest of the plot is composed of Don Quixote’s serendipitous
adventures. He travels as far as Barcelona on the Mediterranean
Sea. In total, he has three expeditions, from which he invariably comes back to his hacienda beaten up and in questionable
health. In a famous episode, he fights against windmills, thinking they are giants. In another, he frees some prisoners, only to
be beaten up by them. In another episode, he faces a fierce African lion being transported in a cage. In yet another, he enters
a mysterious cave and watches a puppet show, only to destroy
the whole set in a rage because one of the characters in the
show is being abused and he wants to correct that wrong. Then,
in reward for Sancho’s services, Don Quixote promises him the
governorship of the fictional island Barataria, which becomes
real toward the conclusion of the novel. And, in the longest
episode in the Second Part, the knight-errant and his squire
are hosted in a castle by the Duke and the Duchess, where, in
carnivalesque fashion, they are ridiculed by everyone.
There is no better way to describe El Quijote than as an intermittent, discontinuous series of adventures unified—at times
rather tenuously—by the presence of Don Quixote and Sancho. I say tenuously because Cervantes’s novel is interrupted
by small, novella-length subplots, some of which are told by
secondary characters to the knight-errant and his squire, who
become mere spectators, as disengaged as the book’s reader.
Throughout the narrative, the tension between what is real
and what is imagined, what the actual world presents and what
Don Quixote sees, is the engine moving the action forward.
In his desire to bring justice to a society marked by inequality, immorality, and corruption, the knight-errant is convinced
that the world, his as well as ours, is controlled by enchanters,
especially Friston the Magician, the most sneaky of them all.
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These magicians mean to undermine Don Quixote’s quest for
justice. As the storyline progresses, various supporting characters, in order to subdue Don Quixote and appease his desire to
subvert the status quo, pretend they too exist in his imaginary
universe, being knights themselves, as well as princesses and
other mythical types. In the end, Alonso Quijano surrenders
his identity as Don Quixote and, on his deathbed, apologizes
for the endless sequence of mishaps he put others through.
In spite of its flaws, El Quijote, a parody of chivalry novels—
those very novels that led Don Quixote to madness—gained
popularity because it announced the dawn of a new era in which
the hero was no longer superhuman. Instead, he was portrayed
as vulnerable, imperfect, and, therefore, human in all his frailties. Novels of chivalry were to early modern Europe of the sixteenth century what thrillers are to our age. The Italian Espejo
de caballerías, translated into Spanish by Pedro López de Santa
Catalina, the Portuguese Palmerín de Inglaterra by Moraes, the
native Iberian Belianís de Grecia by Fernández, and countless
other chivalry titles, either imported or made for national consumption, fed an insatiable hunger. Cervantes opened his book
with spin-off poems dedicated to some of these favorites, such
as this sonnet supposedly written by Amadis of Gaul to Don
Quixote:
Thou that didst imitate that life of mine
When I in lonely sadness on the great
Rock Pena Pobre sat disconsolate,
In self-imposed penance there to pine;
Thou, whose sole beverage was the bitter brine
Of thine own tears, and who withouten plate
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Of silver, copper, tin, in lowly state
Off the bare earth and on earth’s fruits didst dine;
Live thou, of thine eternal glory sure.
So long as on the round of the fourth sphere
The bright Apollo shall his coursers steer,
In thy renown thou shalt remain secure,
Thy country’s name in story shall endure,
And thy sage author stand without a peer.
Novels of chivalry adhere to a basic five-step formula: one, an
open-ended structure, whereby a hero’s adventures are prolonged in book after book, similar to the Sherlock Holmes or
James Bond series; two, the devotion to an idealized woman
to whom the hero declares his Platonic love, expressed through
his actions on the battlefield; three, a Christian concept of
pride and honor against the infidels, who depend on enchantment to succeed in their treacherous tasks; four, the lost manuscript, through which the story of the extraordinary hero could
be accessed directly, and without which the narrative resorts
to an accumulation of indirect accounts; and five, the setting
in an imaginary geography filled with enchanted castles, dragons, monsters, and other chimeras.
Spanish civilization itself is built on the myth of a knight,
Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, alias El Cid Campeador, an eleventhcentury Christian crusader and emblem of valor on which the
knight-errant tradition is based. El Cid is said to have fought
against the Moors, his former allies, advancing a process that
ultimately resulted in an attempt at the unification of Spain
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under the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand in 1492.
Though El Cid’s odyssey is rooted in historical fact, he and the
other knights of chivalry literature are invariably fictitious.
Lord Byron said that El Quijote “smiled Spain’s chivalry
away.” Parody was Cervantes’s way of giving new life to archetypical characters that had become stilted from overuse. The
protagonists, the knight-errant and his squire, aren’t cartoonish; instead they are made of flesh and bone. Alonso Quijano
lives with a niece and a housekeeper. At first he is portrayed as
reclusive, with little interest in social interactions. His horse,
Rocinante, is frail. Sancho Panza has a wife and children and is
an uneducated villager who dreams of becoming the governor
of an island. Neither he nor Don Quixote is fit for the road,
let alone for battle. Unlike the characters created by Amadis
of Gaul and other chivalry authors, Don Quixote and Sancho
suffer inner doubts. El Quijote, after all, is a forerunner of the
nineteenth-century bildungsroman, a novel of education, a
novel about the quest for self-definition.
Such comedic depiction of social affairs quickly became a
favorite of readers worldwide because they saw in it a vivid
assessment of human folly. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, the nation had just entered a new political era.
Philip II, also called Philip the Prudent, a member of the House
of Habsburg, died in 1598. He was an autocrat who negotiated
the nation’s morisco (e.g., Christians of Moorish descent) problem by forcing the remaining Muslim population to convert to
Christianity, which sometimes resulted in revolt. He further
burdened the empire with debt and brought about astronomical inflation. The Armada had been magisterially defeated
more than a couple of decades prior. The Spanish Empire was
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in disarray, and there was a general mistrust of the nation, its
political quagmire, its economic gambles, in European circles.
The roots of anti-Hispanism, a negative response to all things
Iberian from Spain’s American colonies, were also established
in this period.
The person in charge of sending the manuscript to the
printer was Francisco de Robles. The publisher was Juan de la
Cuesta. The first printing of El Quijote, also known as the princeps, considered by Cervantistas to be the official publication
of the First Part of Cervantes’s novel, was of eighteen hundred
copies in 1605. The printing took years to sell out. Still, it seems
to have caught on because pirated editions quickly showed up
in Valencia and Aragón in Spain, as well as in Lisbon, Portugal.
It is known that copies of the novel also made it as a kind of
samizdat to the New World, where the Holy Office of the Inquisition had banned novels—fiction in general—for dangerously
promoting paganism. The knight and his squire soon became
fixtures of festivals as costumed figures, effigies, and wooden
sculptures paraded through the streets of Mexico and Peru.
Yet Cervantes’s contract, in retrospect at least, appears to have
been rather lousy. When he died, not long after the publication of the Second Part, his assets and those of his family were
almost nonexistent.
Likewise, neither the manuscript of El Quijote nor the proofs
survived. This is unnerving to Cervantistas eager to understand
the method the author used to compose the novel. Did he have
a preconceived plan? Was there a journal he found helpful during the composition? Were there numerous drafts? Did he cross
out words, lines, entire paragraphs? We don’t have manuscripts
of any of his other books either, among them La Galatea (1585)
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and Voyage to Parnassus (1614), or his entremeses, his brief oneact theater pieces, often performed before a play.
About a hundred typos were corrected in the princeps. But
other problems weren’t as easily solvable since they relate to
the novel’s structure and the author’s disposition. For instance,
at several points the novel includes entire subplots—actually,
autonomous novellas, such as The Ill-Conceived Curiosity and
The Captive’s Tale—which, as readers frequently point out, have
little connection to the novel’s central theme. The author, in a
moment of laziness, seems to have taken these manuscripts
out of a drawer and inserted them. Scholars do not take these
to be full-fledged mistakes. They are more like detours, typical of premodern literature, where storytelling was not understood as a straight line between point A and point Z. These
novellas have their charm. If pushed to find meaning in them,
a savvy reader will intuitively link them to something in the
overall narrative arc.
As for what one might describe as glaring mistakes, the most
often discussed is the impossibility of Sancho’s donkey being
stolen in one scene (First Part, chapter XXV) and reappearing
soon thereafter, without explanation. Another one relates to
the various names of Sancho in the First Part (e.g., Sancho Zancas) as well as his wife’s different names (standardized, finally,
as Teresa Panza). Obvious mistakes aside, the most unwieldy
problem in El Quijote, aside from its length, is its stylistic carelessness. Cervantes was not a meticulous craftsman. His sentences go on and on and on and on, and so on. An idea that
might be summarized is expanded without reason.
Some of these inconsistencies might be owed to the fact that
Cervantes didn’t have a copy-editor or editor responsible for
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overseeing the entire manuscript. In the early seventeenth
century, there were correctores, typographers in charge of spotting obvious printing errors, but they weren’t in charge of
streamlining the manuscript. We might guess his mistakes are
the result of haste, that he was impatient, even impulsive. But
these are only guesses.
It is quite possible that, barring the existence of El Quijote, Cervantes would not be remembered today. Centuries
after his death, he remains an enigma. As in the case of Shakespeare, his contemporary (under the Julian calendar, they died
the same day), material related to Cervantes’s life is extraordinarily scarce. What we do know is recorded in a handful of
useful, recent biographies, such as the ones by William Byron
(1978) and Jean Canavaggio (1991), and also gleaned from
the unreadable, multivolume “life” written by Luis Astrana
Marín during the early period of the Francisco Franco regime,
between 1948 and 1958. There is speculation about Cervantes’s
exact birthday, but it is known that he was born in Alcalá de
Henares, some twenty miles from Madrid, in 1547. A certificate of baptism and another one of death are available. There
is discussion about his having been a converso, that is, a recent
convert to Christianity or a member of a recently converted
family, although there is a statement dated in 1569 in which he
claims limpieza de sangre e hidalguía, purity of blood, meaning
he was not, at least on paper, a so-called New Christian. Still,
suspicions remain, since Jewish converts and their descendants often swore, out of fear, to be cristianos viejos. A scatter-
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ing of other legal documents has survived, among them one
detailing a fistfight in which he was involved on the doorstep of
his home. But there is little else. No correspondence survives,
nor does any other type of record describing his personal or
artistic habits.
Although people connect Cervantes with the seventeenth
century, in which he published and died, he was in fact a citizen
of the sixteenth. He spent most of his adult years living under
the rule of Philip II, the king of Castile, whose abuse of power
pushed Spain to its disastrous defeat against England in 1588
and whose unstable, almost paranoid views brought along a
series of near bankruptcies, the first in 1557, the last in 1596. In
spite of its trans-Atlantic military enterprises, which the king
consolidated, the nation under him existed in an atmosphere
of instability. King Philip III, his successor, named monarch in
1598, was even worse. His diplomatic reputation was mediocre
at best. In fact, it is often repeated that Spain’s sharp decline
took place under the leadership of his corrupt chief, Francisco
Gómez de Sandoval, Duque de Lema, during the early years of
Philip III’s reign, which lasted until 1621.
Cervantes lived at different times in Seville, Valladolid, and
Madrid. We know very little about his early years. Perhaps he
was a student, maybe even a rowdy one. In 1569, he left Spain
for Italy after he wounded a certain Antonio de Segura in a duel.
Italy, an artistic and cultural hub in the late sixteenth century,
was an obligatory stop for anyone dreaming of making a career
in literature. Italian authors play a significant role in El Quijote,
as in Cervantes’s references to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and the
inspiration he took from Boccaccio’s Decameron.
In Italy, Cervantes enlisted in the Infantería de Marina, the
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Q U I X O T E 14
Spanish Navy Marines, which was stationed in Naples. After
a year, he boarded the Marquesa, part of a fleet that was con­
trolled by the coalition of the Holy League, which included,
along with Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of
Genoa, the Duchy of Savoy, and the Knights Hospitaller, who
were based in Malta. The mission was to confront expansion
of the Ottoman power. In the Battle of Lepanto, on October 7,
1571, he was injured, permanently losing the use of his left arm.
On his way back from Italy, the boat he was sailing on from
Naples to Barcelona, the Sol, was assaulted by pirates. He and
his brother were taken to Algiers, where he was held captive
for five years. He tried to escape four times, and on the next
attempt he was finally able to flee. El Quijote includes a novella,
The Captive’s Tale (First Part, chapters XXXVIII to XLV), possibly inspired by these incidents.
After writing La Galatea, to which he promised but never
delivered a sequel, Cervantes seemed to have trouble getting his work published. Then, when the First Part of El Quijote appeared, the enthusiastic response from readers opened
opportunities for him. Between then and the publication of the
Second Part a decade later, three other works were printed: a
series of mid-size narratives called Exemplary Novellas (1613),
the satirical poem Journey to Parnassus (1614), and his Comedies,
the latter a volume that included an assortment of entremeses.
Thus, Cervantes, in his last phase of life, experienced an outburst of creativity. But nothing he wrote came remotely close
to earning the accolades lavished upon El Quijote. Indeed, the
knight-errant’s adventures became so popular that people
clamored to read a sequel. As in the case of La Galatea, Cervantes promised one but once again was slow in delivering
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it. Taking advantage of Cervantes’s procrastination, another
author, using the pseudonymous name Alonso Fernández de
Avellaneda, whose full identity remains a secret, came out with
a fraudulent Second Part in 1614. (I will discuss this pseudoQuijote in chapter 4, “A Modern Novel.”) Cervantes was rightfully incensed. He quickly completed his own Second Part. Fate
was generous to him, for he had just enough time to complete
and publish it before he died, a few months after its release.
When asked about himself, he glorified his career as a soldier. In one of the most celebrated passages of El Quijote (First
Part, chapters XXXVII and XXXVIII), about the opposition
between arms and letters, Don Quixote, perhaps acting as the
author’s surrogate, endorses the former in an eloquent speech.
“Away with those who assert that letters have the preeminence
over arms; I will tell them, whosoever they may be, that they
know not what they say,” he states. Later on, he adds:
To attain to eminence in letters costs a man time, watching, hunger, nakedness, headaches, indigestions, and
other things of the sort. . . . But for a man to come in the
ordinary course of things to be a good soldier costs him
all the student suffers, and in an incomparably higher
degree, for at every step he runs the risk of losing his
life. For what dread of want or poverty that can reach or
harass the student can compare with what the soldier
feels, who finds himself beleaguered in some stronghold
mounting guard in some ravelin or cavalier, knows that
the enemy is pushing a mine towards the post where he is
stationed, and cannot under any circumstances retire or
fly from the imminent danger that threatens him?
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In other words, only reluctantly did the most enduring Spanish writer of all time perceive himself as a writer. He probably
would have liked to be remembered for his patriotic participation (“the greatest day in history”) in Spain’s glorious defeat of
the Ottomans.
The meager sampling of documents related to Cervantes’s
life doesn’t offer many clues about his looks. No portraits survive, which, again, hasn’t stopped people from picturing him
in vivid terms. In the collective imagination, the author of El
Quijote is of average height, slim, and bearded. These qualities are connected to a narrative self-portrait in the prologue
to his Exemplary Novellas. Nowhere else in his oeuvre is he as
candid as he is in this paragraph. He starts by dreaming that
the most famous Spanish portraitist of the time, Juan de Jáuregui y Aguilar, had agreed to do his portrait. Then he proceeds
to describe his own face. The following quote, rendered into
English by Walter K. Kelly in 1952, is from that preface:
This person whom you see here, with an oval visage, chestnut hair, smooth open forehead, lively eyes, a hooked but
well-proportioned nose, & silvery beard that twenty years
ago was golden, large moustaches, a small mouth, teeth not
much to speak of, for he has but six, in bad condition and
worse placed, no two of them corresponding to each other,
a figure midway between the two extremes, neither tall
nor short, a vivid complexion, rather fair than dark, somewhat stooped in the shoulders, and not very light-footed.
The reference to his dental condition is intriguing. Some find
in it evidence that the knight-errant is Cervantes’s alter ego,
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since early on in Don Quixote’s exploits (First Part, chapter
XVIII) he loses some of his teeth in a fight. Soon thereafter, in
an exchange with Sancho in which the pair counts the number
of lost teeth, the knight-errant says that “never in my life have
I had tooth or grinder drawn, nor has any fallen out or been
destroyed by any decay or rheum.”
This “likeness” of Cervantes, as presented in Exemplary
Novellas, is important because, in the pictorial representations
that have been created of the two over time, Cervantes is indeed
made to look like Don Quixote and vice versa: they are, in
some way, doppelgängers. Needless to say, in a narrative where
doubles play an important role, this is no coincidence. In the
First Part, chapter I, the knight-errant is described thus: “The
age of this gentleman of ours was bordering on fifty; he was
of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured, a very early riser and a
great sportsman.” Cervantes was pushing fifty-eight when the
First Part was released, and given his past military adventures,
it is easy to imagine him a hardy, early-rising sportsman.
Juan de Jáuregui y Aguilar never produced a portrait of Cervantes, though two forgeries were initially attributed to him.
The first one says “Cervantes c. 1600.” The second was owned for
years by Marqués viudo de Casa Torres. The first portrait of the
author, a rather stilted one, depicts him with his mouth closed
(i.e., hiding his denture), as is usual in the images of those days,
and appeared in the front matter of the French translation of
Exemplary Novellas, published as Nouvelles de Michel de Cervantes in 1705, approximately ninety years after the author’s
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Cervantes (c. 1600), attributed to Juan de Jauregui y Aguilar.
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death. The anonymous lithograph presents him sitting at his
desk, with a pile of books on the floor. An angelic child floating
in the background, an inspiration of genius, offers him a pen,
which he intends to hold with his right hand. Cervantes wears
a mustache and beard and is dressed in Renaissance attire. But
his facial features are dull.
Is this what he looked like? Was his demeanor that of a valiant caballero? A more focused portrayal was produced in 1738
at the London printer J. and R. Tonson, under the auspices of
Baron de Carteret. The face has a suspiciously Shakespearean
look. Again, Cervantes is sitting at his desk, the right hand
writing with a feathered pen, the left hand hidden. Behind him
is a small theatrical window in which a knight—it might be
Don Quixote himself—makes an appearance. The identity of
the artist remains a mystery.
Portrait of Cervantes (1768),
engraved by Jacob Folkema.
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These two images have been reproduced multiple times
throughout the centuries, defining the way we imagine Cervantes. Another engraving, this one done by an artist known
as Hulett in London in 1742, portrays Cervantes as a mestizo.
This may have to do with the fact that Spain, in the eyes of
eighteenth-century England, was an awkward, semi-barbaric
country close to Africa (known originally as Barbary). But it
also prompts the question, to what extent is it accurate to visualize Cervantes through a Caucasian prism? Given the discussion that has taken place over several centuries of his having
Jewish blood, and based on his intense interest in things Muslim in his oeuvre, it is possible that the novelist wasn’t white.
Curiously, there is another portrait by Achille Devéria, done in
Paris in 1825, that portrays Cervantes as black.
As mentioned before, Spain in the late sixteenth century was
awash in ethnic hullabaloo. La Convivencia, a term referring to
Portrait of Cervantes (1868),
artist unknown.
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the cohabitation in the Iberian Peninsula of Christians, Jews,
and Muslims, was coming to an end in 1492, the year of the
Reconquista, during which the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand
and Isabella attempted to unify Spain under a single faith.
First they expelled the Jews and then, later the same year,
the Arabs. But the previous centuries of cohabitation, brought
on by the fall of the Roman Empire and the dissemination of
its population across Europe, the Mediterranean Basin, and
northern Africa, produced a society marked by racial crossfertilization, despite the religious tensions and even violence
that defined the period.
There is an 1868 portrait, released by the publisher J. B. Lippincott in Philadelphia, its artist unknown, that emphasizes
the histrionic, as if Cervantes belonged to a theater troupe.
One engraving by C. A. Leslie and Danforth of 1876, published
by Porter and Coates, also in Philadelphia, makes him look
almost uncomfortable, as if disdaining the attention granted
to him. And an oil painting by C. A. Machado, done around
1900, in which Cervantes is holding El Quijote with his maimed
left arm and has a feather pen in his right hand, casts him
in stately terms. Among my favorite portraits of Cervantes
is the first pictorial interpretation commissioned by the Real
Academia Española (RAE), the federally funded institution in
Madrid charged with safeguarding Spain’s cultural heritage.
This portrait, by J. del Castillo and Salvador Carmona, based
on an image falsely attributed to Alonso del Arco, might be
the one most frequently reprinted inside Spain. It was used as
the frontispiece in the official RAE edition of Don Quijote de la
Mancha released in 1780. It presents Cervantes as a bearded,
fashionable twentieth-century intellectual. The commission
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came at a time when the Spanish government started to look
at Cervantes as an author who could represent the nation’s patrimony. (More on this in chapter 6, “Quijotismo and Menardismo.”) That RAE edition, by the way, also includes an engraving
featuring Don Quixote and Aldonza Lorenzo surrounded by an
assortment of characters and motifs, from an African slave to
a castle, a lion, and a bonfire of burning books, while an angel
descends from heaven with a laurel in hand. Behind all of them
is a pedestal in which the title of Cervantes’s novel is proudly
displayed—Quixote spelled with an x, not a j.
A counterfeited portrait attributed to Diego Velázquez,
known as Velazquez pinx. Dessiné e gravé par Bouvier. Cervantè
d’après le tableu original du Cabinet de M. Brière, appeared in
Geneva in 1825. Born in 1599, Velázquez, the baroque court
artist, was Cervantes’s junior by more than fifty years. When
the First Part of El Quijote was released, Velázquez was six
years old. There is no record of the two having met.
Cervantes (1825), by Charles
­Bouvier, falsely attributed to
Diego Velázquez.
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This isn’t the only Cervantes portrait falsely attributed to a
famous Spanish artist. There are images purportedly painted
by El Greco, who was indeed Cervantes’s contemporary. Born in
Crete, then part of the Republic of Venice, El Greco lived some
of his life in Toledo, about forty-five miles from Madrid, where
Cervantes died. Another portrait was supposedly made by El
Greco’s son, Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli.
All these images make Cervantes look like Don Quixote,
who, in the First Part, chapter I, is described as “one of those
gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a
lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.” The number of Don
Quixote look-alikes and forgeries emphasizes where Cervantes
is situated in the Spanish imagination. Fiction begets reality,
not the other way around. He is the national author par excellence, whose oeuvre represents the country’s idealism as well
as its humor.
None of the portraits ever depict Cervantes as anything
but an adult. Nor do they present him as a soldier in Lepanto.
Or as a captive in Algiers. Instead, they represent a scrapbook of knights. But did Cervantes imagine himself as his
knight-errant?
Other sources offer us a hint of how Cervantes perceived
himself. In his preface to El Quijote, Cervantes describes himself as the owner of a “sterile, ill-tilled wit.” (He might have
preferred the other epithet awarded him by critics: el genio lego,
the ignorant genius.) Early in the novel (First Part, chapter VI),
we get another perspective when the protagonist, Alonso Quijano, by then already known as Don Quixote, has his personal
library inspected by two village censors and the hidalgo’s good
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Q U I X O T E 24
friends, the priest and the barber. While browsing through the
titles, the barber comes across Cervantes’s La Galatea, which he
mentions to the priest. In turn, the priest replies:
“That Cervantes has been for many years a great friend
of mine, and to my knowledge he has had more experience in reverses than in verses. His book has some good
invention in it, it presents us with something but brings
nothing to a conclusion: we must wait for the Second Part
it promises: perhaps with amendment it may succeed in
winning the full measure of grace that is now denied it;
and in the mean time do you, senor gossip, keep it shut up
in your own quarters.”
Also in the preface, Cervantes opts to portray himself not as
Don Quixote’s double, or even as his sibling, but as his father—
or better, as his stepfather. He writes in the preface to the First
Part:
Sometimes when a father has an ugly, loutish son, the love
he bears him so blindfolds his eyes that he does not see
his defects, or, rather, takes them for gifts and charms
of mind and body, and talks of them to his friends as wit
and grace. I, however—for though I pass for the father, I
am but the stepfather to Don Quixote—have no desire to
go with the current of custom, or to implore thee, dearest reader, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, to
pardon or excuse the defects thou wilt perceive in this
child of mine.
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Yet while Cervantes’s oeuvre at times overshadows him, he
doesn’t suffer from an “authorship problem” the way Shakespeare does. (Theories abound that the “real” author of Shakespeare’s work was someone else, such as Christopher Marlowe;
Francis Bacon; William Stanley, the sixth Earl of Derby;
Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford; or even Queen
Elizabeth I.) In the Bard’s case, the inquiries revolve around a
number of issues, among them the mystery of how a provincial
actor with a limited education in Stratford-upon-Avon could
compose such an erudite, astonishingly diverse body of work.
There’s no such disassociation with Cervantes. His known
journeys through Spain, Italy, northern Africa, and the Mediterranean Sea are present, although tangentially at times, in
the pages of El Quijote. And the style of the novel is consistent
with that of his other works. Plus, in the preface and within his
magnum opus there are references to La Galatea, Avellaneda,
and other aspects of his own career.
In sum, Cervantes might not have left us many clues about
his life, but no one believes he was a deceiver, a charlatan, a
fraud. What about Don Quixote, though?
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